WORKSHOP: Wobble, Swirl, Silence, Scream: Using Syntax to Express Mental Health States with Katherine E. Standefer
WORKSHOP: Wobble, Swirl, Silence, Scream: Using Syntax to Express Mental Health States with Katherine E. Standefer
Sunday, October 18
9AM PT / Noon ET
This workshop is taught by guest teacher Katherine E. Standefer.
In this two-hour workshop with memoirist Katherine E. Standefer, you’ll learn how to use syntax—sentence- and paragraph-level craft choices, including punctuation, spacing, rhythm, tone, and register—to create visceral experiences of mental health states in your writing. We’ll also discuss how syntax choices can pace a story, slowing down or speeding up the unfolding. Come ready to build some new sentences as well as to look at short samples by published authors together.
No preparation needed. Come as you are.
Katherine E. Standefer‘s debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life was a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, an New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Lightning Flowers was the Common Read at Colorado College in 2022, featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, and named one of O, The Oprah Magazine‘s Best Books of Fall 2020. Standefer earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona. She has been a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge. Her work appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. She lives in a cabin in Wyoming.